Apple iPad flies through airport security

“The iPad, as Steve Jobs told us from his comfy leather chair at Macworld, represents a new computing form factor that falls squarely between the laptop and the smartphone,” Andy Greenberg reports for Forbes. “Which raises a curious problem for the Transportation Security Administration: Is the iPad a ‘laptop’ that must be taken out of a bag and put through a scanner separately? Or does it fall into some other, less bomb-like category of gadget that can slip through security hidden in your briefcase?”

“The answer, according to Altimeter Group technology analyst Charlene Li, seems to be another point in the iPad’s favor,” Greenberg reports. “As she wrote in her Twitter feed today, Li took a flight with her iPad in tow and discovered that she wasn’t required to pull it out of her bag in the security line.”

Greenberg reports, “The TSA seems to draw a fairly fuzzy line between what does and doesn’t qualify as a computer capable of hiding a bomb. Li says a Kindle doesn’t count, but a netbook does, and so does an XBOX… Given these shades of semantics, we’ve put in a call to the TSA for the whole story about the iPad’s airport security status.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Good luck with this in the future as, in our experience, one TSA guard’s interpretation is virtually guaranteed to be different than one in the very next lane.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “qka” for the heads up.]